Managed flash storage performance is becoming increasingly demanding. Compact consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets, and gaming devices require cost effective and low power storage solutions. Examples of managed negated AND or NOT AND (NAND) flash storage devices include embedded MultiMediaCards (eMMC), universal flash storage (UFS), External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (eSATA), ball grid array (BGA) SATA, Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive, Secure Digital (SD) card, universal subscriber identity module (USIM) card, and compact flash card. NAND devices are popular for mobile applications because they are low cost and low power.
Existing managed NAND flash storage devices rely on large file translation layer (FTL) tables contained within the NAND flash memory, and cache only a small portion of the tables in on-chip static random access memory (SRAM). Read and write accesses to the managed NAND device consist of logical addresses which must be translated to physical NAND addresses using information from the FTL table. This leads to long delays (on the order of tens of microseconds) when reading the FTL table entries from NAND memory, degrading the overall performance of these types of storage. Thus, the penalty for low cost and low power consumption in NAND memory devices is a reduction in memory access time performance.